I live in an older apartment complex. This has its upsides and downsides. Upside is that the construction seems to be more sturdy and the walls are thicker, so I have less problems with noisy neighbors. Downside is things like what happened last week.

I come home Thursday evening to find a note on our door from the apartment office. Apparently, they have decided (in conjunction with my cable company) to rewire the complex or somesuch. Because of this, my cable TV and my internet was scheduled to be down all weekend and into this week. My cable company was giving me a discount on the bill but it would still mean that I would be unable to partake in Beta Event 4. I, of course, was crushed.

Luckily, I remembered that my Droid 2 phone (through Verizon) could be used as a Mobile 3G hotspot. Now I must admit, I had little hope in the speed or latency of the connection but it was worth a shot, right? And, because of my work, I have unlimited data on my service. Might as well try it!

Well, I am happy to say that my little Droid 2 and Verizon performed more than adequately. I averaged 80-130MS latency throughout the entire weekend and only disconnected twice due to an incoming phone call. The download speed for the patches was not near as fast as my cable connection but, other than that, it worked fine. I must say, I am pretty impressed. Good job Verizon!

So, as for the Event itself, it was pretty awesome. I had decided, earlier in the week, to re-role to the Lotham server. I had been playing on the RP=PvP server because that was one of the few without a queue last week and it was not a bad server but I am preferring Lotham. I decided on Lotham because that is the server that most of Goon Squad had rolled on. They are going Defiant there so I am going Guardian. I have a lot of memories from Goon Squad back on the Mal’Ganis server and I figure that I can relive some of those glory days on Lotham.

I first created a Cleric and went with the Warden/Inquisitor/Purifier spec and it seems to be a lot of fun and very effective for both leveling and PvP. However, it is just not might style so after hitting level 16 I dropped the character and made another Rogue. This time I went with Saboteur/Assassin/Riftstalker and what a nice combination it is! The burst damage is just insane.

My Saboteur! Ain't he pretty?

Most of my points are in Saboteur with the remaining points in Assassin for the +crit bonus and I can do an amazing amount of burst damage after applying my charges. The strange thing about the Saboteur is that you do no damage when applying your charges and then one large burst damage after detonating them. The saboteur has a large number of different charge types, each has a different effect. The first one you get, Blast charge, does a tremendous amount of single-target damage when detonated. After that you get the Spike Charge which does burst and then a very large DoT to a single-target, the Shrapnel Charge which does a large amount of damage to the target and all targets around him and the Caltrop Charge which snares the target longer for each active Charge when it detonates.

In addition to the Charges, the Saboteur is full of other little tricks. You have an Adhesive bomb which is a targetable AoE snare, a Fragmentation bomb which is AoE damage to the target and any targets around him and a Chemical bomb which is a targeted AoE ability. All in all, the Saboteur is full of neat little tricks.

For the first few levels, you will find yourself just applying Blast charge five times and Detonating but as you get higher level, you will be mixing up the charges quite a bit especially in PvP. I normally applied a couple of Blast Charges, then the Spike charge for the DoT and maybe a Caltrop charge for the snare. Detonate that and you do a lot of burst damage with some DoT damage and you slow the target down. Lots of fun and lots of room for experimentation dependent on the situation.

Combined with the Assassin’s Stealth and the Riftstalker’s teleport abilities, I was a highly mobile instrument of death. None of the Saboteur’s abilities (except traps) have a cast-time so I could move around at will and never pause except for laying down a trap. This suits my playstyle in PvP to a tee and was a lot of fun.

Speaking of PvP, we had our first look at Warfronts this weekend. Warfronts are Rift’s version of battlegrounds in World of Warcraft or Scenarios in Warhammer Online. If you like those you will like Warfronts because there is little difference in the ones we saw. The first, Black Garden is a fairly simple map in which you have to grab a “thing” (The Fang of Regulos) from the middle of the map and control it to receive points. Of course, the other teams job is to take it away from you so the entire team is required to keep you up and healed. In addition, the Fang itself places a DoT on you that gets worse as time goes on so heals are very important. The Warfront is very similar to a few of the WAR scenarios. So much, in fact, that it is time to revive a great comic strip that breaks down the objectives very well:

Someone needs to make a Rift version!

The Warfronts went really well but it is painfully obvious that Guardian is entirely outnumbered and by far the less popular of the two factions. The queue time on the Guardian side was nearly instantaneous at all hours of the day and night but on the Defiant side it could take up to 20-30 minutes to get into a game. There are simply too many Defiant and too few Guardians and it is really showing. In addition, most of the big PvP guilds rolled Defiant and, in many cases, Guardian was simply outmatched. Early in the weekend I lost almost every game I played but it evened out Sunday night to Monday morning and I went on a 17 game win streak.

I think that a few of the major Defiant PvP guilds should possibly reroll to Guardian for release. This will make for a better experience for both sides. Getting destroyed in every match is not fun but neither is winning every match with no competition and waiting for a long time for queue pops. Hopefully, this will even out at release. We shall see.

Other than that, the rest of beta was very smooth and Trion is continuously showing us new tricks with the Rifts. The events this weekend seem less numerous than the prior weekend but they added some neat stuff to them. The events now add a zone-wide sky change when they happen, which seems particularly ominous. The entire sky turning red and the color scheme shifting to make it seem like the whole forest is on fire was pretty cool. I was unable to partake in the Gloamwood events because of my level but I hear those are cool as well.

Its the End of Days!

Well, thats it for now but I intend to make another post soon about leveling and leveling without questing. Hope to see you soon!

One Response

I remember that comic! I just got into beta so I never got around to trying out warfronts. Too busy re-rolling various classes to find one I would like. I was also on the PvP-RP server. I’m concerned about two things right now, one being the instanced battlegrounds. They killed open world PvP in both WoW and WAR, so why will Rift be any different? Also I’m concerned about faction balance as you mentioned.